Quote:
Originally Posted by Nagoyankee
As a Japanese tax-payer, I won't tolerate anyone calling the JET program b***s***. It's run entirely by our tax money. It was started many years ago when the Japanese economy was in its best and healthiest shape in the 20th century. People should give a lot of credit to Japan for even maintaining the program into these recent years when it no longer has any money to spare.
What other countries offer anything even close to JET? Certainly not the OP's country! I would have loved to teach Japanese in the U.S. through the same type of a nice government program. Every year, JET gives thousands of people from abroad a chance to live in Japan and experience its culture first-hand while earning a good income for the inexperienced young teachers that they usually are. JET gives you 100% job security when so many workers in Japan, Japanese or foreign, are having to work under much worse circumstances.
JET isn't b***s***. It's really the opposite of that if anything.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hatredcopter
If he was that good at Japanese, he should have tried for the CIR position instead. It requires functional Japanese skills, and is more suited for people with a bit more experience in Japan. That's what I did, and I find it a lot more fulfilling than being a run-of-the-mill English teacher (in my humble opinion!). Even if he were dead-set on being an English teacher, there's a lot of other places he could have applied and probably gotten accepted.
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JF is lucky to have both of you as members, and two truer comments in a row have never been posted.
Right now in the Japan the image of "teacher" for children of any age is aging. What I mean is, new Japanese teacher are NOT being hired, as there are fewer children to teach. So children see people in their late 30s and up as "teacher age" now. When I taught in Japan in the 90s there were lots of teachers in their 20s. Now the only teachers in their 20s working at public schools in Japan, essentially, are JETs. Nagoyankee is right. The Japanese people pay a lot to have native speakers come and live in Japan to teach their children. It isn't bulls**t.
And Hatredcopter asks the best question. If his Japanese was so good, he would be a more obvious choice for CIR. If he was "overqualified" for ALT, then CIR is the way to go.